Utah’s Spellbinding ‘Spiral Jetty’ Has Been Added to the National Register of Historic Places

Jutting from the shoreline of Utah’s Great Salt Lake is an unusually long, curling limb of land. Titled Spiral Jetty, the large-scale swirl was constructed in 1970 by artist Robert Smithson, who was known for manipulating earth into abstract shapes. Now, the land artwork has been added to the National Park Service’s National Register of Historic Places.

“We are delighted that Spiral Jetty has received this important recognition, which will help us spread awareness of the iconic artwork and advocate for its long-term preservation,” says Jessica Morgan, a director of Dia Art Foundation, which owns Spiral Jetty, in a statement. “In the 54 years that Spiral Jetty has existed, it has been both submerged by the Great Salt Lake and stood far from the lakefront, bearing witness to the changing landscape around it.”

Dia acquired Spiral Jetty in 1999, when Smithson’s widow, Nancy Holt, donated the artwork. Over the years, the foundation has collaborated with the Great Salt Lake Institute, the Holt/Smithson Foundation and the Utah Museum of Fine Arts to care for it.

Spiral Jetty is one of the world’s most famous works of land art: art that’s created directly in and from a landscape, either by sculpting earth or building with natural materials. The medium became popular during the 1960s and ’70s within the conceptual art movement, which prioritized artists’ ideas, plans and intentions over the artworks themselves.

Smithson, born in New Jersey in 1938, rose up in the global art scene during the 1950s, making paintings, drawings and sculptures that often referenced science fiction, poetry and pop culture. He was also inspired by physical spaces—especially those in his home state. In the 1970s, Smithson began making earthworks, the art pieces that would define his career. Per the Holt/Smithson Foundation, he was committed to sculpture that would “collaborate with entropy”—embracing the chaos of a natural space.

“I was always interested in … origins and primordial beginnings—you know, the archetypal nature of things,” Smithson once said, per the foundation. “As an artist, it is sort of interesting to take on the persona of a geological agent, where man actually becomes part of that process rather than overcoming it.”

In 1970, Smithson traveled to the Great Salt Lake’s Rozel Point peninsula, northwest of Salt Lake City, and arranged 6,000 tons of local black basalt rock into a 1,500-foot-long, protruding line, which reaches into the lake and curls counterclockwise into a spiral.

“I think it was just unimaginable to so many artists that had been working in their studios and creating works that you hang on a wall, or smaller sculptures,” Kelly Kivland, a former Dia curator, told the Deseret News’ Court Mann in 2020.

Smithson created other significant pieces of land art in the years that followed. In 1971, he built Broken Circle/Spiral Hill: a rounded jetty and canal on the edge of a sand quarry in the Netherlands. In 1973, he started Amarillo Ramp, a sloping semi-circle of raised earth in Texas, but he died in a plane crash before finishing it. Smithson’s widow and two other artists completed it for him.

Spiral Jetty remains Smithson’s best-known work. Over the years, it has drawn attention to the Great Salt Lake’s natural features, like its otherworldly pink color and ever-shifting water level. In 2017, Spiral Jetty was named the state of Utah’s official artwork.

As Dia curator Jordan Carter tells Artnet’s Vittoria Benzine, the artwork’s new designation as a nationally registered historic place will not come with any physical signage or plaques. “We hope the enhanced recognition will dissuade other interventions in the landscape that negatively impact the environment and the lake’s ecology,” he says.

“Beloved in Utah and far beyond, this artwork has come to mean many things to many people,” says Morgan in the statement. “We are proud to continue our work caring and advocating for Spiral Jetty to preserve it for generations to come.”

Sonja Anderson | READ MORE

Sonja Anderson is a writer and reporter based in New York City.